The gay guy at Galaxy Fair 94

I'm sure that gay guy had a real name, but I don't remember what it was, and he might not want it in some strange woman's blog anyway, so let's move on.

So I was setting up stuff in the art room, and gay guy walked by wearing mostly black leather and a dog collar. He was being led around on a leash by a blond girl who later turned out to be his sister. And he told me right away that he was gay. I wondered at first if had been overly friendly, but apparently that is just what he does. Right away he's like "Hi, I'm gay." So that way he doesn't waste time trying to be friends with you if you can't deal with it. Pretty soon after that, religion came into the conversation. I'm a Christian, and maybe I should say that right away so I don't waste time trying to be friends with you if you can't deal with it. Anyway, we went on to talk about the art and whether or not he liked this or that costume and the usual stuff that you talk about at conventions.

So that was nice. Catch you later.

So later, I am in the costume contest with the borg costume, and I do just this tiny bit of the When Harry Met Sally restaurant scene as part of the show. And it was a lot of fun, and I tied with a friend for Best Trek.

So after the contest, I run into to this gay guy again. And he is like, you were all talking about being a Christian, and then you get on stage and have an orgasm.

And I'm like, I didn't know Christians weren't supposed to have orgasms.

A mostly uneventful couple of days

Well, my husband's schedule came in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I was momentarily excited. He was supposed to work in someplace called Brownwood. Now, there are several places with similar names in Texas, and I had this one mixed up with someplace else entirely.

Brownsville is in the very southern tip of Texas, about an hour or so from South Padre Island. Now that would have been an excellent place to go right before he has all this time off. Work a couple of days in Brownsville and then drive to South Padre and spend a few days on the beach.

And then I think there's a place called Browntrail, which is in a more northern part of the state, but not in the Panhandle area. It is very near the New Mexico border. Again, he could work a couple of days and then we could have driven to someplace interesting in New Mexico for a couple of days.

But no. This was Brownwood, about three hours away from us in the middle of nowhere. It isn't particularly near anything interesting. So it was basically drive there, try to find a nice motel and a couple of nice restaurants, work a couple of days, and drive back.

So I would have skipped the whole thing and let him go without me, except that he remembered something funny about the last time he had to go there. It had an Underwood's Cafeteria, though at the time he was there it was closed for remodeling. My husband and I both have less than pleasant memories of being forced to eat Underwood's barbecue, and we were wondering if the place was as bad as we remembered. There aren't many of these places around anymore, and in fact this might be the only one left. So we decided we would go to this place for lunch on Tuesday or Wednesday, just for laughs.

We were running a bit behind schedule on Tuesday, and after getting a room at the Days Inn, we barely had time to get a sandwich at Subway. And of course the restaurant would be closed before he got off of work Tuesday night, so we'd have to go to Underwood's for lunch Wednesday.

Wednesday, at a little after eleven, we pulled into an almost empty parking lot and read a sign that said they were closed on Wednesdays.

We had a good laugh and drove down the street to have some tamales instead.

He got off work early that night, but not early enough to pack and head home. So we went to Starbucks and then drove around for a bit to look at Christmas lights.

It was almost a wasted trip, except that he did make some money, and I knitted about half of a new scarf.

The next day we stopped at the Dr. Pepper bottling museum in Dublin. The line was not running, which now only happens on Wednesdays, and maybe not even on Wednesdays if some machine is being repaired. The "Dublin Dr. Pepper" (made with Imperial Pure Cane Sugar) in the newer bottles are now bottled in Temple with the Dublin recipe. We were each given a bottle to drink on the tour, but I don't really care for the drink myself, so mine is still sitting unopened in the kitchen. I would have made an exception and drank that one, but I still had the peppermint shake left over from lunch.

Anyway, we were the only two people on the tour, which surprised me at first, until I realized that they probably only have customers during the summer and on Wednesdays. And, with the line closed down, there's not that much to see. The man who owned the place the last time we took the tour died in 1999, and it's really not the same tour when given by a college kid.

Never mind. Christmas is just a few days away, and it's time to wrap presents.

Happy Holidays.

Missing an old blog buddy

Cabinboy has not posted anything since September.

I know that it is none of my business. He's a grown man, and it's a free country, and he's allowed to stop blogging any time that he wants to. I just wonder what happened to him, that's all.

It's not like he said he wasn't going to blog anymore. That would be nice, if people would leave a note saying that they're too busy to deal with the blog for the next year or so. But I guess they rarely do that. Just one day he didn't blog for a while, and then his next post was about his dog dying. And then the post about the dog was removed, and then nothing.

His mom hasn't posted anything on her blog since then either.

It's silly to think that anything happened to them. It's silly to be concerned about people I have never even met. I should get over it.

I wonder what happened to Cabinbabe too.

Happy Holidays, wherever you are.

The end of North Hills Mall

Okay, so it is not the end of North Hills Mall, since that happened a number of years ago. But tonight on the news they said it was actually going to be torn down. It is in violation of some code, it's a hazard of some sort, and the owners have about two months to have it demolished.

The building has only been totally vacant for about two years. I don't remember how long ago the mall closed, but they kept trying to do something else with it for a while. I think for a time part of the movie theater was converted to have live plays, but I never went there to see any. I can't imagine that the place is falling down or anything like that already, and I think the building is only thirty years old anyway. It seems so wasteful to tear it down. Surely it could be fixed up and made into something else.

The really odd thing about the whole North Hills Mall thing, is that it is about a mile away from the North East Mall, which is so busy that about ten years ago they evicted people from their homes to add on to the mall and make more parking spaces and two new shopping centers.

Both malls are located right where three freeways converge. North Hills Mall is in North Richland Hills, and North East Mall is in Hurst. If it were not for all of the bridges and overpasses in the way, you could probably see one mall while standing in front of the other. And I believe that they were both built at about the same time. The North East Mall was the larger mall, with the standard anchor stores such as Sears and Wards and Dillard's, while the North Hills Mall had some less familiar anchor stores that were maybe supposed to be a bit more high-scale. And the North Hills Mall had a Luby's Cafeteria and a food court right near the main entrance, while the North East Mall originally sold food throughout the mall. Both originally had movie theaters, though not of the same company.

Funny thing, but when I was a kid, I never realized that the two malls were right next to each other like that. I mean, they are not actually on the same freeway, and you can't see one while you are in the parking lot of the other one. And when I was a kid going to the mall, I was too busy talking in the back seat to pay attention to where were were driving. And we never went to both malls on the same day, so it was about ten years before I knew where they were in relation to each other. When I was younger, I preferred the smaller mall, since both had movie theaters, but only the smaller one had the food court. And I didn't care one way or the other about the anchor stores. I liked the smaller stores and candle shops, and things of that kind were in both malls.

But the North East Mall, the one that was larger to start with, continued to grow despite the closing of Wards and later the United Artists movie theater. The North Hills Mall also lost one of its anchor stores, and it seemed to be in rapid decline after that.

Anyway, it just never made sense to me why the people at the North East Mall didn't just buy out the smaller mall and fix that up rather than evict people from their homes to add on the mall they already had. So the little mall is about to be demolished, and the stores nearby are also losing business and closing, while the larger mall just gets larger and the traffic becomes more of a hassle. I just don't get it.

Not who I used to be

Oh, I'm still a nice person. I was always a nice person who liked Star Trek and all of that. And I was always an artist, and I've been a writer since I was eleven.

But I used to be more efficient. I used to be make better use of my time.

Now I'm doing good to even know what time it is. Or even what day it is.

And the awful thing is that I think some of the problem was actually caused by going to college.

Not that I'm not glad I went to college. I like going to college. I plan to go to college again next year.

It's just that I picked up a lot of bad habits in college. Before college, I knew what was expected of me most of the time, and what I was supposed to be doing, and when I was supposed to be where. In school before college, I didn't have any problems getting things done. Everyday, I was supposed to do X amount of work. If I could do more than X amount of work in a day, I would go ahead and do it. I would finish something early, and move on to the next thing. I would get so far ahead in my work, that my parents would actually let me stay home from school once in a while.

If I hadn't have gotten distracted by discovering boys, I might have really done something interesting, but that's another story.

So I had school all worked out and I was all into the whole working ahead of schedule for everything else too, until I went to college full time. And then everything became about grades and deadlines. I somehow stopped doing things when they were supposed to be done or done ahead of time, or even when I would get the most out of it. Somehow a lot of us just end up organizing our time in the order of what important things have deadlines that come first. So maybe I have math homework, but I'm not going to do the math homework because I can do that any time and I can probably catch up next week, but this week I need to study for a history exam on Friday, and I also have to read something for English. And whatever science lab work I had to do gets done at a certain time because that is when we are scheduled to be in the lab, but the rest of the homework for that class gets done here and there and I'm usually reading a paragraph or two in between classes and before lunch. We were supposed to read this chapter this week, but I didn't finish it, and we're not getting tested on it til next week, so that's okay.

Only now I can't seem to get anything done without a deadline schedule. Most everything is like math homework, and it's always here, and it can always get done later, and really no one but me will know if I didn't do it at all. The dishes can be done later. The laundry can be done later. Christmas presents must be bought at least a day before the Christmas party or it will be too late to wrap them. The bathroom can be cleaned later, but my costume must be finished before a certain event or I might as well not even go. When I have a job, I have to be there at the scheduled time, but everything else can wait.

And I never seem to get anything done at a reasonable time anymore. The laundry is not done, and I can't find anything to wear. The dishes haven't been done in a while, so now I'm afraid to go near the sink.

But all of the Christmas presents I've managed to buy so far are already wrapped. The rest of the people I buy presents for are probably going to end up with gift cards at the last minute. Not because I don't want to get them something else or even because I don't have time to get them something else, but just because wandering around the mall some more won't make the perfect presents magically appear. So if I can't get them something I know they'd really like, I should get them gift cards instead. But I still have this hope that something better will occur to me, so buying the gift cards will wait until the last minute.

It's just all about the deadlines, even at Christmas.

Talk about the weather

As predicted, we did not do the whole Clean Sweep thing yesterday, so the house is still a mess. We did not even do one room. We did very little except watch TV.

For about a week the TV weather people had been warning us about the first freeze of the year. It was coming. Do something. Bring in your pets, cover your plants, wrap your exposed pipes, etc....

That was on the TV Wednesday night when I fell asleep, and it was still on TV the next morning when I woke up. So I poked my head out the door to see what all the fuss was about.

And it didn't look bad at all.

It had rained the night before, but the ground was just wet, not frozen. The temperature was just at thirty-two degrees, but it didn't seem to have done any damage. Not at all what I had expected to see with all the school closings and all. But, there could be patches of ice elsewhere in the Metroplex. It's not like the whole area has exactly the same temperature and conditions.

Still, it was cold, and my plan for the day was to stay inside and eat soup and drink hot chocolate.

But there is always something that changes the plan. Like I forgot that at least one of us had to go out and drop off a package. There is almost always that. And as long as we are going to go outside anyway, we might as well go out and have lunch.

Strange, but it got colder. That rarely happens. The rain and such can happen anytime, but the actual drop in temperature usually gets to the low point during the night or very early morning. So when one would think that it should be warming up, it actually dropped a few more degrees and was only twenty-eight when we went out. And by then there was sleet or freezing rain or something. Still, it doesn't seem to be sticking to the road, so it was mostly safe to drive on except over bridges. So it was safe to go to lunch.

Later, after we were safe at home, there was white stuff falling. But it didn't look like snow at all. I mean, it sort of looked like snow until you got a closer look, cause if you picked it up it didn't stick together like snow, and it wasn't soft and fluffy like snow. It was more like big grains of sand or little tiny glass beads.

Then later, it did snow. So there was three layers of different stuff on the ground, but not enough of any of it to cover the grass. And now it's totally gone, except for a few patches here and there in the shadows.

Now, we rarely get a nice normal snowfall, but that was weird even for here.

Clean Sweep

My house is a total disaster.

About six months ago, I almost had everything in order. The place wasn't perfect, but except for some actual remodelling that needs to be done and carpet that needs to be replaced, the end was in sight. I had gotten rid of a lot of stuff, and I knew where everything else was.

And then life happened, and the rest of that was put on hold while I tried to deal with a personal tragedy.

And then after that, we went out of town, a lot. My husband has to make a lot of short trips here and there, and he wants me to go with him most of the time. And, unless there's a really good reason to stay home, I go with him.

And on the days that we are not out of town, we somehow manage to forget to do the dishes before we set out again, not do enough laundry, not put away the non-perishables from the grocery store, not find a proper place to put the Christmas presents we've purchased, etc....

So now the place looks worse than it did before I started cleaning.

My husband is a fan of a cable show called Clean Sweep, where someone takes everything out of your house, and you separate all of the stuff into groups of things you want to keep, things that you want to donate to someone else, and things that just need to be thrown away. And then you're not allowed to take anything you want to keep back into the house until you have a proper place for it.

So my husband is always wanting to do this, but he rarely actually sets aside time to put such a thing into practice. But he's decided we need to at least do something like that, maybe just do one room at a time. And he's set aside time to get started on it. He would like to do a room tomorrow.

Of course, it will not get done tomorrow.

Tonight will be the first freeze of the year, and I really can't see either of us standing out in the cold front yard trying to decide what we really want to keep, when all we really want to do is stay inside and keep warm.

It was a nice thought, and I'm glad he really wants to help this time, but I think that the spring cleaning is actually going to have to wait for spring.

Day After Thanksgiving Shopping

This morning I got up and went shopping with the other lemmings, though I did not get up as early as most of them. No, I didn't even leave the house until after seven, spent about twenty minutes in the store, picked out a few things, grabbed a bunch of snacks and sodas, paid for all the stuff, checked the receipt, and briefly went home to unload some of the stuff and make sure that my husband was awake enough to go to work.

Not even eight o'clock yet, and according to the receipt I've saved almost seventy dollars, which would have been about twice as much as I'd have spent if I didn't decide to go back for three packs of Dr. Pepper. And that was just at a drug store. But it went so well that I decided to go to another one and do most of it again (minus the sodas) on the way to the mall.

Then I'm wondering if I should maybe just skip the mall. I don't really "need" anything there, do I? But I've got my list, and I keep going.

By taking a side entrance and heading for the Michael's instead of the mall parking garage, I get the car parked without too much trouble. It's a nice day, so I can just walk.

There are still people hanging around the mall customer service area. I had thought I was too late for whatever early shopper thing they were doing, but there were still a lot of people waiting for something. But I decided not to stop. Even if I'm in time for whatever it is, well, I don't know what it is, and finding out would delay my getting to the stuff I actually came to get.

There are a lot of people at Bath & Body Works, but not too many. Which usually means that they've already run out of the good deals. But no, there's still plenty on the shelves and someone is bringing out more boxes. So I pick out my freebie that I'm going to get if I spend thirty dollars, and then I go and get four wallflowers, which is the big on-sale-before-noon thing that we all got the email about. So then a try a sample of this and that while I decide what to spend the rest of the thirty-bucks on. I pick up a twelve dollar hand cream, but then someone brings out some candles that are also on sale before twelve, so I buy two of them instead. Then I get in line, and there are about eight people directing traffic and such. There's a couple of people offering to massage your hands with some aromatherapy thing while you wait. Another guy hands out little samples of lip gloss. A couple of others are reminding people that if you spend thirty dollars you get this freebie thing. And they're not just trying to talk people into spending more, they're actually telling people that they're already carrying thirty dollars worth of stuff, so if they want the freebie thing just say which one and someone will go and get it for them. And then when you get to the cashier, she says that there was a limit on the sales items, but they're not going to run out before twelve, so if you want to buy two more and also get a freebie thing, someone will go and get that for you.

Nice people.

So I've got my on sale wallflowers and my on sale candles and my freebie thing for spending thirty dollars and I still get to use my coupon for ten dollars off of thirty dollars. Nice. Two bags of stuff with price tags of over ninety dollars and I got all that for twenty plus tax. And I got two more coupons when I left, so I'm probably not done yet.

This is so much fun.

Next, I had to go and buy a sweater. Just a sweater, for me, to replace something that really doesn't fit right now. It was on sale for about a third of what it normally costs. This was at Sears, and I'm not going to complain, it wasn't near as bad as it could have been, but the much shorter line took a lot longer to get through, and no one offered to massage our hands, or get us a freebie, and there were no lip-gloss samples. So despite only going in to get the one thing, and only stopping to look at the one thing, I was in the Sears just as long as I was in the other store, and by the time I got out I was tired and hungry.

Well, that's okay. I'm probably pretty close to my spending limit for the day anyway. I decide to skip the rest of the list and head out. But if I'd have thought about it a little more, I'd probably have eaten in the mall and gone through the line at Bath & Body Works a second time. That was such a pleasant experience.

I stopped for lunch and noticed I was right next to an Asian supermarket. And that was something I needed anyway. I have this lame idea that I'm going to make one of those online copycat recipes of an oriental salad dressing from a restaurant my friend likes, and if it turns out okay I'm going to give him the recipe card and a bottle of all the ingredients. I don't know what else to get him that someone else hasn't already thought of. His wife is getting something from Bath & Body Works, but somehow I don't picture him happily unwrapping candles and body cream.

So I got all that shopping done before twelve, including the Asian market stuff that I had forgotten about. And then I didn't do anything useful for the rest of the day. Nice.

The busiest travel day of the year

Well, that's what the day before Thanksgiving is supposed to be. But I hardly ever travel on that day, because most of my family lives here. In fact, when I was little, one set of grandparents lived an hour away, and the other set lived about two or three hours away, so that we did our traveling on the holiday itself and didn't have to deal with any traffic at all.

But after my husband got a job that involved a lot of travel (mostly in Texas), I did have to deal with the dreaded Wednesday before traffic a couple of times. And yesterday was one of those times. But yesterday's traffic wasn't bad at all, at least where we were.

So Monday we had to drive a few hours away, to the place I spent the first eleven years of my life. There's nothing to do there. It is quite boring. Next month, there will be Christmas lights to look at, but this week, nothing.

Still, I went anyway, to spend a little time with my husband. We drove by my old house. The people who live there now are really into the spirit of things and already have a lot of Christmas decorations up. The two front yard trees are gone now. I wanted to look in the back yard and see if the plum tree was still there and if the storm shelter was made good use of, but I didn't look. Nor did I look in the backyard of the house across the street to see if the Fort was still there. I think it was, maybe I just couldn't see it because it was painted a different color.

We had lunch at The Glass Kitchen, the world's only drive-thru where you can actually understand what is being said because you talk to a real person instead of a microphone. It has never made sense to me why everyone does not have this same design. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered from my last stop in town (I should have asked for a chili-cheeseburger, but those are so messy), and I'm always surprised how small it looks. When I was a kid it seemed like a really big square building, like a Walmart, but no, it's just a little hamburger stand.

After working only two days, we headed home, and stopped at a small town that we used to spend a lot of time at about ten years ago. The Walmart my husband did business from was closed, replaced by a Supercenter outside of town. A Taco Bell/KFC had been added, but it was closed for renovations. More of the little shops on Main street had closed down, and very few of those remaining where open yesterday. We stopped at the soda fountain, and were told that the two old antique dealers from next door finally moved to California, and they both died soon after.

Not much to do there either, so after I finished my ice cream we got going again. There was hardly any traffic until we were almost home. We got to I-35, and there was the traffic waiting for us. Only I couldn't tell that much of it was really from out-of-town travelers. At some point we thought, lets just go ahead and get off at this exit and do a little shopping, and there everyone was, going to the mall. We didn't actually go to the mall, but a shopping center nearby, and we mostly just looked at a few things and stopped for lunch.

So it was not a bad day before Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a really fun day off either. Now I'm off to decide which movie to see after we eat, then plan out tomorrow's shopping.

Happy Thanksgiving

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Just holding a place.

I'll get back to this later.